One Year to Live

Anthony Burgess was
40 when he learned that he had only one year to live. He had a brain tumor that
would kill him within a year. He knew he had a battle on his hands. He was
completely broke at the time, and he didn't have anything to leave behind for
his wife, Lynne, soon to be a widow.

Burgess had never
been a professional novelist in the past, but he always knew the potential was
inside him to be a writer. So, for the sole purpose of leaving royalties behind
for his wife, he put a piece of paper into a typewriter and began writing. He
had no certainty that he would even be published, but he couldn't think of
anything else to do.

"It was
January of 1960," he said, "and according to the prognosis, I had a
winter and spring and summer to live through, and would die with the fall of
the leaf."

In that time
Burgess wrote energetically, finishing five and a half novels before the year
was through (very nearly the entire lifetime output of E.M. Forster, and almost
twice that of J. D. Salinger.)

One year to live
But Burgess did not die. His cancer had gone into remission and then
disappeared altogether. In his long and full life as a novelist ( he is best
known for A Clock-work Orange), he wrote more than 70 books, but without the
death sentence from cancer, he may not have written at all.

Many of us are like
Anthony Burgess, hiding greatness inside, waiting for some external emergency
to bring it out. Ask yourself what you'd do if you had Anthony Burgess's
original predicament.

Ask Yourself: "If
I had just a year to live, how would I live differently? What exactly would I
do?"